


The Murdered Do Haunt Their Murderers

by Margo_Kim



Category: Crimson Peak (2015)
Genre: F/F, F/M, Fantasy, Ghosts, Incest Kink, Masturbation, Post-Canon, Sexual Fantasy, Shame, Sibling Incest, Trauma, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-10
Updated: 2015-11-10
Packaged: 2018-04-30 22:06:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,686
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5181386
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Margo_Kim/pseuds/Margo_Kim
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She sleeps in fits and diagonally across a bed meant for two. When the spring comes and Birmingham begins to melt, the season suffused with an uncharacteristic warmth that smells like rotting meat, Edith sleeps on top of the sheets and naked. She learns to appreciate the nights when she opens her eyes to see Lucille staring at her. Ghosts always did make the room colder, though Lucille is of course no ghost.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Murdered Do Haunt Their Murderers

**Author's Note:**

> For an anon request over on [my tumblr](http://margotkim.tumblr.com). God bless you, anon.

Edith leaves Alan in hospital while he's sleeping. He looks at her with wounded eyes and she cannot stand the sight. There's a train bound elsewhere so Edith boards it. In a sleeper car, she lies dressed as a farmhand, her own clothes too blood-soaked to wear outside Crimson Peak, underneath a stranger snoring. Edith clasps her hands over her heart. Two days ago, these hands killed her sister, her husband's sister and lover and captor. But she was still Edith's sister. She'd never had a sister before, and had once upon a time longed for one with all her heart, the self-same heart now beating underneath the palms of a murderer's murderer. The longing had been after her mother's death, between the funeral and the ghost, the warning that Edith hadn't understood until it was too late. The dead have no idea the words the living need most to hear—not warnings but simply words of love.

If grey-faced Thomas had said he'd loved her before he consigned himself to oblivion, would Edith be able to sleep now?

No, she decides. Those weren't the words that Edith needed. She would have settled first for a decent apology. For what he’d done to her. For what he’d made of her.

 

 

The first time the house creaks—her new house, her rented one in a neighborhood in Birmingham where lives no one she knows—Edith drops her saucer. Later as she picks up the pieces of broken china, she chides herself for forgetting what it is that houses do. They creak, they moan, they groan, even the most innocuous of them, even the most innocent. Her townhouse was built within the last five years, and the last family that lived here left without fuss. Edith's life is not a ghost story, doomed to haunting and little more than haunting, the tired repetition of a life in a horror novel. Edith's life is a story with ghosts. And Crimson Peak can keep its ghosts.

After all, she lives. Alan lives, albeit somewhere else, somewhere far away from her. They live. That is the happiest of happy ending, isn't it? Not that they lived happily ever after, but simply that they lived, that the narrative continued, that there were more adventures to be had, that this wasn't the end of the road for our heroes.

So. They live.

There’s no place for ghosts here.

But Edith still sees Lucille’s face when she least expects it. The mirror, mostly, looking back at Edith with the cold placidity of the looking glass. Lucille always looks as she did in her final moments, her hair tumbled down till it brushed her feet, her white dress and white skin stained pink with blood. The left side of her head craters; Edith did that. Edith lowers her face to the water basin, washes her face. By the time she straightens, Lucille is gone. She’s memory not ghost, and Edith is getting better at banishing memories.

She sleeps in fits and diagonally across a bed meant for two. When the spring comes and Birmingham begins to melt, the season suffused with an uncharacteristic warmth that smells like rotting meat, Edith sleeps on top of the sheets and naked. She learns to appreciate the nights when she opens her eyes to see Lucille staring at her. Ghosts always did make the room colder, though Lucille is of course no ghost. Lucille’s spirit still lingers in Crimson Peak. Edith knows. One week after the thaw, Edith rode a train to the closest station and hired a carriage to take her up the gates. She couldn’t get within a mile of the Hall before she turned around. Her soul cried out in protest, the dead shrieked at the invasion. A man at the post office who didn’t recognize Edith told her that the mistress of the Hall wanted it torn down “After everything that happened.” That’s how he phrases it.

Lucille will be torn down with it, her bitter and fractured soul put to whatever rest the damned know when the jail of her heritage is at last razed. “Burn the wood and salt the earth,” Edith writes to the caretaker. It is an order. She is, after all, still the lady of the house.

 

 

Edith is a married woman. Was. Is. Edith is a widow, and thus she is a married woman for the one relies on the other. And because she is a married woman, she knows something of men.

That is what the world believes at least.

 At once respectable and spoiled, the widow represents that most alluring of figures to men—a woman they can fuck who knows how to fuck them back. Men fantasize about breaking women in (just as women fantasize about their own breaking), but they also now and then yearn for a piece of horseflesh that already knows how to take the saddle and spur. And what can Edith say to those who think this of her, who leer at her, the widow living alone in Birmingham? That she knew her husband but once? That she nearly died for the pleasure? The most Edith learned of women and men was Lucille in Thomas' lap, her hand grasping at him as she sang.

Edith doesn't think of that memory, can't stop thinking about it. They are both dead; let them stay dead. But they are both dead; they are hers alone. Who should think of them if not her?

She doesn't sleep easily in the bed she bought for herself with what's left of her father's fortune. The space is too vast. Even now in the dark hours of the night, she wakes and starts to reach for Thomas, and upon finding only air where he ought to be, she still thinks to light the candelabra and go on tremulous feet through the dark to find him. Even now, when she knows he is dead. Even now, when she knows what she would find.

At night Edith watches the moonlight slant across her naked body, watches it dip her in silver light. The light travels down her body as the night rises. It paints her throat and then her breasts, her ribs, her stomach, below. She follows the moonlight with her hand, follows it down to her nadir, her apex. Her blonde thatch turns grey in the pale light. She becomes an aged woman, a ghost herself.

The men of the world are right. She is changed by the touch of marriage. As a maiden under the weight of her sheets she would wring pleasure from herself until she drew blood, biting her lip to keep silent. She thought of a man, smart and sweet who thought Edith sweet and smart, thought of his hands unbuttoning the back of her wedding gown, thought about the touch of his lips against the back of her neck, his hands reaching around to lift her skirts. She thought about what he would murmur. I love you, perhaps. You’re beautiful. I’m not worthy.

As a widow, her body lies dead as her fantasies. The moonlight passes, disappears behind the window sill, and Edith is left with nothing but aching muscles and a hollow want. The lips that would kiss reek of poison. The hands that would reach slough off their skin as they grab at her soiled skirts. I’m sorry, he whispers in her mind, and that’s a fantasy as much as the old ones were, but it’s not one that does her any good. What she wanted is dead. There’s nothing to replace it. The earth of her dreams lies fallow and salted.

 

 

Except. One night Edith wakes and reaches for Thomas, then reaches for the candle to chase him down, and her feet are on the ground before her morality wakes up as well. Edith had not forgotten what she would find. She had remembered and that is why she stood with such haste, and swaying in the dark of her own bedroom, miles away from the ruins of hell she survived, she worries—in the way you worry about the worries you don't name, can't name, the way you worry about the state of the drapes so you never have to think about why you drew them shut and never let them open—that knowing what she would find has done nothing to dampen the desire to search. That in fact desire has not abated at all. But it is a different one, a picture hidden on the edges of what she thought she knew, and she will not unlock the box within herself in which she has hidden it. This little bit of mercy is all she can offer herself.

Edith does not forget that Lucille was the one who chose what to lock and free. Edith does not forget that Lucille was always the one with the hip full of keys.

 

 

It is the height of summer, and the rain has done nothing to dampen the heat which seeps like lazy spirals of sweat through the city. Edith locks herself in her bedroom and writes naked. The moon is bright enough tonight that she needs no candle to read her own words. The first draft of _Crimson Peak_ is nearly done. When she is finished, she will comb through it for the truths she forgot to conceal. Already she has had to rewrite a dozen times her final description of Lucille. The language of the erotic and the horrific lie so closely together that Edith cannot help how they bleed together. She rereads her own descriptions of Lucille—the tumbling hair and grasping hands, the swell of her breasts underneath her white linen gown, the way the blood soaking her dress reveal even more the curves of her figure, the feminine secrets that had been lurking always under the veneer of bustles and corsets and lies—and Edith puts a single black slash through all of them.

Her pages fan over her lap, her hair cascades over her breasts, when Edith looks up and sees distorted through her reading glasses the figure of Lucille standing at the foot of her bed. Edith removes her glasses. The figure is gone, the room empty again. Edith pulls the paper off of herself as she sits up, kneeling in bed as she peers into the dimness of the room outside her island of moonlight. There is no one there. There is not even the shiver of a ghost.

Edith lowers herself back down to the sheets and finds she has no more stomach for edits this night. It is trepidation that claws her stomach, surely it is trepidation and fear and worry and all such feelings and their ilk. That is what makes her toes curl, makes her stomach seize. Horror and excitement lie too close together. A novice might mistake them. Edith knows better. The sweat prickles on the back of her neck, her thighs clench, and she tells herself that this is simply horror.

Edith slides underneath her sheets. It’s too hot to sleep like that, but she wants the cover, needs the cover. She curls onto her side, fetal, facing the empty place where someone else ought to be sleeping. When she shuts her eyes, she could be anywhere. Birmingham is quiet tonight, with little noise save for the rain, and the house she rents groans from the humidity. She could be anywhere. She could be lying in her husband’s bed at Allendale Hall. She could reach over any moment to find him there. Or not.

And if she was at Allendale Hall, if she was at Crimson Peak, and she reached over now, where would he be? In his sister’s bed. In his sister. He’d be making those little groans, those choked noises in the back of the throat that she had heard as he pressed into him, as she pressed into him, her skirts spread over his body as he shuddered and gasped underneath him. And Lucille—what would Lucille do? She would watch him with both eyes open. She would watch him in silence until his shame, her pleasure was done, and when he was spent, she’d kiss him as a sister kisses her brother and send him off to bed.

Edith doesn’t moan. She spent too long living in her father’s house where sounds carried from entryway to attack to allow even a whimper to escape her lips, but she presses her lips together nearly as tightly as her thighs. She traps the hand that has crept down there, against her will, against her conscious will. It is a limb possessed. Someone else moved it, someone else pressed its fingers against her. Edith is as wet as if she’d been bleeding.

Edith thinks about bringing her hand up, about seeing her fingers dripping crimson, and this time she does moan. It tears itself out of her.

The Sharpes are dead. So is Crimson Peak. She is here and not there, that is what Edith reminds herself with a desperation not unlike the kind that beat in her breast when she’d been fighting for her life, Lucille stalking like a wild beast set on devouring Edith whole, the shape of her body through the muslin of her dress and her hands red with Thomas’ blood, her brother’s blood painting her savage. Their final act of intimacy.

Edith was wrong. Edith was wrong. Lucille was here. She was no memory, no weak apparition of a mind’s trauma like Edith had known ten minutes ago, Lucille was _here_ , her spirit freed from the shackles of Crimson Peak with Crimson Peak’s destruction. Lucille was here and it was she who moved Edith’s hand, who pressed Edith’s palm against herself in such a way that that Edith’s hips could not help but rock. It was Lucille here, Edith knew that, Lucille must be here and this had been her scheme all along, this was the happy family they might have built. Sometimes it would have been Thomas who returned to Edith’s bed, and sometimes it would have been Lucille.

Edith gasps at the thought as Lucille’s hand—it must be Lucille’s hand, it certainly couldn’t be hers, it would never be hers, Edith would never want this and so this must be forced upon her, this pleasure, this pleasure inseparable from revulsion and shame—pressed into Edith’s core, fingers slipping in too quick into her heat and tightness, pain as sharp as a knife and hot as blood. Edith rolls over, her face buried in the pillow, hiding as best she can as Lucille probes at the heart of her. There’s a chill that naivety would say was a breeze from the open window, but Edith knows better. Lucille’s specter presses like ice against Edith’s flushed, fervent skin.

She hurts, she hurts, it _hurts_ , the hand burying itself in her like a blade as her body ruts itself raw against the mattress, and every fresh pain bleeds pleasure so rich and heady that Edith cannot breathe when the finale arrives, the death stroke, the orgiastic violence of climax. Her body is not hers as she writhes with pleasure. Something else moves her, some devil beneath her skin.

When the devil is gone, when Edith’s body cannot move from aching not unlike what she felt when Lucille pushed her off the balcony with hands still hot from Thomas, Edith draws her own hand back against her chest. She wipes it clean on the linens beside her. In her throes, she has kicked off the sheets, and when the wind blows in rain through the open window, it mingles with the sweat that coats her.

When Edith rolls over, the pages of her novel crackle underneath her. In the morning when she wakes, she will find the mirrored inscription of her own words inked into her skin, the sweat of her staining her where she lies. When she wakes, it will be from a sleep deeper than any she has known since the first time the Sharpe siblings danced her about the room.


End file.
